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MySpace and Citysearch Join Forces

posted on March 31, 2009

MySpace is still huge despite not getting the degree of attention that other social media outlets get. myspaceAccording to Compete.com from January ’09 it slipped to second behind Facebook when ranked by number of monthly visits. Despite the huge numbers (810 million visits in Jan. ’09) there is little talk about the business applications beyond the music world and products that skew very young. With as much talk as there is about Twitter, you would think it’s getting just as big as MySpace but in January Twitter is getting just 7% of the monthly visits that MySpace does.

In a similar position is Citysearch. As we have discussed here in the recent past Citysearch is working to updatecitysearch-logo and expand its offerings to a much larger audience. The competition that is coming up in the rear view mirror for these guys are the likes of Yelp!.

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Does Social Media Really Have the Pulse of the People?

posted on March 30, 2009

Advertising Age has an interesting position in the business world these days. The publication is sometimes representative of the old guard. I ad-age-logoremember at PubCon in Las Vegas where that point was made in a video that Rance Crain, AdAge’s editor-in-chief, was shown saying that Blendtec simply needed to take out print ads to accomplish what was done with its “Will It Blend” campaign. Ouch. He didn’t appear to be on top the one of more impressive stories of the social media marketing age.

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Google Hasn’t Stopped Hiring

posted on March 30, 2009

Last week’s news of Google letting 200 sales google-2and marketing employees go certainly raised eyebrows. Many are wondering whether the search giant is getting leaner and meaner or if they are being dinged by the current state of the economy. If the 360 jobs listed on their website are any indication one has to think that their main reason for the actions of last week were to, like they said, eliminate redundancy and unnecessary layers. Having that many jobs posted certainly is encouraging for those that fit the profiles of these openings.

Of the jobs offered only 30 or so are in the sales and marketing area. There appears to be a rather international flair to the openings as well. If you are looking for that account management position in Cairo that you always wanted this may be your chance. Sales not your thing? How about an engineering position in Krakow?

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“New” Findings on Mobile Web Living

posted on March 27, 2009

The Pew Research Center has released a report that gives some form to what many of us already know throughmobile-usage-image experience; mobile web use takes web users deeper into their digital existence. As noted over at MediaPost the study takes a stab at coining some new phrases to describe the various types of people using the mobile web as part of their lives including “digital collaborator”, “ambivalent networker” and “drifting surfer”. While creating names for groups of people can be fun that particular set of names isn’t very flattering aside from the collaboration concept. Let’s look a little closer.

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Google Sheds More Staff

posted on March 27, 2009

Google continues to make itself leaner and meaner as we trudge through this economic mess. In only the google-logo1second large layoff in its history (the first coming back in January of this year when they let 100 recruiters go) the target this time is sales and marketing.

As reported by ClickZ about 200 Googlers from these areas will be let go. Most of this is coming from internal auditing that has shown some significant redundancy in positions and functions. SVP of Global Sales and Business Development Omid Kordestani wrote in a blog post today

“In some areas we’ve created overlapping organizations which not only duplicate effort but also complicate the decision-making process,” Kordestani said. “That makes our teams less effective and efficient than they should be. In addition, we over-invested in some areas in preparation for the growth trends we were experiencing at the time.”

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China and That Freedom of Speech Thingy

posted on March 26, 2009

Remember all the discussion of China and its approach to the Internet that was heard around the Beijing youtube-logoOlympics? It seems that a lot of that type of coverage has slid into the background until recently. Apparently once Google gets involved these items become news again.

At this moment China’s Internet users cannot view YouTube. The Chinese government claims that it had nothing to do with the outage but its timing with the airing of footage on YouTube of detained Tibetan protesters being beaten seems a bit more than a coincidence to the rest of the thinking world.

Google’s take on this is

Google spokesman Scott Rubin told InternetNews.com that it is still working to bring its video-sharing site back online and identify the cause of the outage.

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Browsers Under Attack More and More

posted on March 26, 2009

There has been a lot of talk recently about browsers and the maneuvering that is occurring in that spacefirefox-logo due to new releases and expiring agreements and more. While most of us would like to just talk about social media and search marketing all day it’s hard to ignore problems when they are browser related because they can affect literally everything we do as Internet marketers.

So the latest security bug in Firefox as reported by PC World seems more urgent than most. We all understand that nothing is truly secure on the Internet but we also like to think that there are not glaring vulnerabilities in the tools we use on a daily basis. As the PC World article states: